Thursday, February 2, 2017

The Maharal's view of women - inferior

The Maharal has become a centerpiece of modern hashkafa, R' Hutner, R' Dessler, R' Kook, R' Moshe Shapiro and other modern day hashkafists have all used the Maharal as the basis of their thinking.  When I started asking internal questions, the answer I got most of the time was look at the Maharal, he deals with your questions (which was not actually true). Therefore, it is fascinating to see the Maharal's view of women. The Maharal clearly and unequivically views women as inferior to men.

The Daas Torah blog has been doing a series of posts about the the Torah's view of women and the Maharal has been prominently featured:

 Maharal - because women are on a lower spiritual level they don't observe all the mitzvos like men
Maharal: Because of the lust of women in Egypt - Jews were redeemed
Women don't ask for marital relations directly - Refined character or curse? 
 Maharal - Listening to wife's advice lead to Gehinom/Satan was created with woman
 Maharal - Why a husband can go to Gehinom for listening to wife's advice about the world or spirituality
Maharal - woman was created before man because she is less important
Maharal - Women have binah yeseira - they have extra primordial intellect as opposed to the abstract intellect of man

What's fascinating is the readers response to these posts (see the comments). The readers are upset that he is publicizing these views. They continually ask him what is the point of his posts. I totally agree with R' Eidensohn's answers here are some of his comments:

I have answered this repeatedly. If that is the Torah position then you should know it. I am working on a book on the issue of gender and sexuality. This has nothing to do with me personally. This is simply the mainstream view from our mesora.

Are you saying that only by distorting or denying what the Torah says are people able to accept it?! Are you ashamed of what G-d's views are? I am not making up anything and I am not cherry picking minority views. Please show me that the mainstream view taught by our Mesora is significantly different that what I have been presenting.

Again tell me that you feel that the Maharal is a obscure minority opinion and show me the sources that constitute the majority. If you acknowledge that this is the majority position of Torah authorities then you have to explain why this should be concealed, misrepresented or simply ignored. If you are claiming that if people really knew what Torah Judaism is about they would be ashamed of it and therefore we shouldn't tell the truth - I think that is basically apikorsus. Next you will tell me that we should conceal the Torah view of intermarriage and homosexuality or capital punishment or anything else which is not politically correct?

The readers are upset because the Maharal's position is so out of step with the way that we view women nowadays and they can't deal with it. It seems very clear to me that R' Eidensohn is absolutely correct that the Maharal represents the authoritative majority view of women in Jewish thought. The question is how should we deal with this? One way to deal with it is to ignore it as the commentators want, but that is simply a bandaid. There is a real problem that needs to be dealt with, the Torah's view of women. The other option is the OO path which is trying to reinvent Judaism as being equal for women. However, IMHO that is just as bad because it is a distortion of the sources.

I can't reconcile the Judaism's view of women with the modern view of women, I work everyday with smart competent women and see women all over society in all kinds of roles. The answer IMHO is that much if not all of Judaism is not divine and therefore, Judaism was very much influenced by the attitudes of the surrounding society to women. The Chachamim who created much if not all of Judaism were imbued with the negative attitude towards women that was rampant in ancient societies.



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